"Holy shit!" Steve said. "This is amazing."

"Fucking weird is what it is," Cynthia replied, then looked around to see if she had offended the old man. Billingsley was nowhere in sight.

"Young lady," Johnny said. "Weird is the mosh pit, the only invention for which your generation can so far take - credit. This is not weird. This is rather nice, iii fact."

"Weird," Cynthia repeated, but she was smiling. Johnny guessed that The American West had been built in the decade following World War II, when movie theaters were no longer the overblown Xanadus they had been in the twenties and thirties, but long before mailing and multiplexing turned them into .Dolby-equipped shoe-boxes. Billingsley had turned on the pinspots above the screen and those in what once would have been called the orchestra-pit, and Johnny had no trouble seeing the place. The auditorium was big but bland. There were vaguely art-deco electric wall-sconces, but no other grace-notes.

Most of the seats were still in place, but the red plush was faded and threadbare and smelled powerfully of mildew. The screen was a huge white rectangle upon which Rock Hudson had once clinched with Doris Day, across which Charlton Heston had once matched chariots with Stephen Boyd. It had to be at least forty feet long and twenty feet high; from where Johnny stood, it looked the size of a drive-in screen.

There was a stage area in front of the screen - a kind of architectural holdover, Johnny assumed, since vaudeville must have been dead by the time this place was built. Had it ever been used? He supposed so; for political speeches, or high school graduations, maybe for the final round of the Cowshit County Spelling Bee. Whatever purposes it had served in the past, surely none of the people who had attended those quaint country ceremonies could have predicted this stage's final function.

He glanced around, a little worried about Billingsley now, and saw the old man coming down the short, narrow corridor which led from the bathrooms to the backstage area, where the rest of them were clustered. Old fella's got a bottle stashed, he went back for a quick snort, that's all, Johnny thought, but he couldn't smell fresh booze on the old guy when he brushed past, and that was a smell he never missed now that he had quit drinking himself.

They followed Billingsley out onto the stage, the group of people Johnny was coming to think of (and not entirely without affection) as The Collie Entragian Survival Society, their feet clumping and echoing, their shadows long and pallid in the orchestra sidelights. Billingsley had turned these on from a box in the electrical closet by the stage-left entrance. Above the tatty red plush seats, the weak light petered out in a hurry and there was only darkness ascending to some unseen height. Above that - and on all sides as well - the desert wind howled. It was a sound that cooled Johnny's blood. . . but he could not deny the fact that there was also something strangely attractive about it. . . although what that attraction might be, he didn't know.

Oh, don't lie. You know. Billingsley and his friends knew as well, that's why they came here. God made you to hear that sound, and a room like this is a natural amplifier for it. You can hear it even better when you sit in the front of the screen with your old pals, throwing legendary shadows and drinking to the past. That sound says quit-ting is okay, that quitting is in fact the only choice that makes any sense. That sound is about the lure of empti-ness and the pleasures of zero.

In the middle of the dusty stage and in front of the curtainless screen was a living room-easy chairs, sofas, standing lamps, a coffee-table, even a TV. The furniture stood on a big piece of carpet. It was a little like a display in the Home Living section of a department store, but what Johnny kept coming back to was the idea that if Eugene Ionesco had ever written an episode of The Twilight Zone, the set would probably have looked a lot like this. Dominating the decor was a fumed-oak bar. Johnny ran a hand over it as Billingsley snapped on the standing lamps, one after the other. The electrical cords, Johnny saw, ran through small slits in the lower part of the screen. The edges of these rips had then been mended with electrical tape to keep them from widening.

Billingsley nodded at the bar. "That come from the old Circle Ranch. Part of the Clayton Loving auction, it was Buzz Hansen n me teamed together and knocked it down for seventeen bucks. Can you believe it?"

"Frankly, no," Johnny said, trying to imagine what an item like this might go for in one of those precious little shops down in SoHo. He opened the double doors and saw the bar was fully stocked. Good stuff, too. Not primo but good. He closed the doors again in a hurry. The bottles inside called to him in a way the bottle of Beam he'd taken out of the Owl's had not.

Ralph Carver sat down in a wing-chair and looked out over the empty seats with the dazed hopefulness of a man who dares to think he may be dreaming after all. David went over to the television. "Do you get anything on this - oh, I see." He had spotted the VCR underneath. He squatted down to look at the cassettes stacked on top of it

"Son - " Billingsley began, then gave up.

David shuffled through the boxes quickly-Sex-Starved Co-eds, Dirty Debutantes, Cockpit Honeys, Part 3 - and then put them back. "You guys watch these?"

Billingsley shrugged. He looked both tired and embarrassed. "We're too old to rodeo, son. Someday maybe you'll understand."

"Hey, it's your business," David said, standing up. 'I was just asking."

"Steve, look at this," Cynthia said. She stepped back raised her arms over her head, crossed them at the wrists and wiggled them. A huge dark shape flapped lazily on the screen, which was dingy with several decades' worth of accumulated dust. "A crow. Not bad, huh?"

He grinned, stepped next to her, and placed his hands together out in front of him with one finger jutting down.

"An elephant!" Cynthia laughed. "Too cool!"

David laughed with her. It was an easy sound, cheerful and free. His father turned his head toward it and smiled himself.

"Not bad for a kid from Lubbock!" Cynthia said.

"Better watch that, unless you want me to start in calling you cookie again."

She stuck her tongue out, eyes closed, fingers twiddling in her ears, reminding Johnny so strongly of Terry that he laughed out loud. The sound startled, almost frightened him. He supposed that, somewhere between Entragian and sundown, he had pretty much decided that he would never laugh again . . . not at the funny stuff, anyway.

Mary Jackson, who had been walking around the onstage living room and looking at everything, now glanced up at Steve's elephant. "I can make the New York City skyline," she announced.

"My ass!" Cynthia said, although she looked intrigued by the concept.

"Let's see!" David said. He was looking up at the screen as expectantly as a kid waiting for the start of the newest Ace Ventura movie.

"Okay," Mary said, and raised her hands with the fingers pointing up. "Now, let's see. . . give me a second.

I learned this in summer camp, and that was a long time ago -

"What the fuck are you people doing?" The strident voice startled Johnny badly, and he wasn't the only one. Mary gave a little scream. The city skyline which had begun to form on the old movie screen went out of focus and disappeared.

Audrey Wyler was standing halfway between the stage-left entrance and the living-room grouping, her face pale, her eyes wide and hot. Her shadow loomed on the screen behind her, making its own image, all unknown to its creator: Batman's cloak.

"You guys're as insane as he is, you must be. He's out there somewhere, looking for us. Right now. Don't you remember the car you heard, Steve? That was him, coming back! But you stand here . . . with the lights on . . . playing party-games!"

"The lights wouldn't show from the outside even if we had all of them on," Billingsley said. He was looking at Audrey in a way that was both thoughtful and intense as if, Johnny thought, he had the idea he'd seen her somewhere before. Possibly in Dirty Debutantes. "It's a movie theater, remember. Pretty much soundproof and light proof. That's what we liked about it, my gang."

"But he'll come looking. And if he looks long enough and hard enough, he'll find us. When you're in Desperation, there aren't that many places to hide."

"Let him," Ralph Carver said hollowly, and raised the Ruger .44. "He killed my little girl and took my wife away. I saw what he's like as much as you did, lady. So let him come. I got some Express Mail for him."

Audrey looked at him uncertainly for a moment. He looked back at her with dead eyes. She glanced at Mary found nothing there to interest her, and looked at Billingsley again. "He could sneak up. A place like this must have half a dozen ways in. Maybe more."

"Yup, and every one locked except for the ladies'-room window," Billingsley said. "I went back there just now and set up a line of beer-bottles on the windowledge inside. If he opens the window, it'll swing in, hit the bottles, knock em over, smash em on the floor. We'll hear him, ma'am, and when he walks out here we'll fill him so full of lead you could cut im up and use im for sinkers"

He was looking at her closely as he uttered this grandiosity, eyes alternating between her face, which was okay and her legs, which were, in John Edward Marienville's umble opinion, pretty looking spectacular.

She continued to look at Billingsley as if she had never seen a bigger fool. "Ever heard of keys, oldtimer? The cops have keys to all the businesses in these little towns

"To the open ones, that's so," Billingsley replied quietly. "But The American West hasn't been open for a long time. The doors ain't just locked, they're boarded shut The kids used the fire escape to get in up front, but that ended last March, when it fell down. Nope, I reckon we're as safe here as anywhere."

"Probably safer than out on the street," Johnny said.

Audrey turned to him, hands on her hips. "Well, what do you intend to do? Stay here and amuse yourselves by making shadow-animals on the goddam movie screen?"

"Take it easy," Steve said.

"You take it easy!" she almost snarled. "I want to get out of here!"

"We all do, but this isn't the time," Johnny said. He looked around at the others. "Does anyone disagree?"

"It'd be insanity to go out there in the dark," Mary said. "The wind's got to be blowing fifty miles an hour, and with the sand flying the way it is, he'd be apt to pick us off one by one."

"What do you think's going to change tomorrow, when the storm ends and the sun comes out?" Audrey asked. It was Johnny she was asking, not Mary.

"I think that friend Entragian may be dead by the time the storm ends," he said. "If he's not already."

Ralph looked over and nodded. David hunkered by the TV, hands loosely clasped between his knees, looking at Johnny with deep concentration.

"Why?" Audrey asked. "How?"

"You haven't seen him?" Mary asked her.

"Of course I have. Just not today. Today I only heard him driving around. . . walking around. . . and talking to himself. I haven't actually seen him since yesterday."

"Is there anything radioactive around here, ma'am?" Ralph asked Audrey. "Was it ever, like, some sort of dumping ground for nuclear waste, or maybe old weapons? Missile warheads, or something? Because the cop looked like he was falling apart."

"I don't think it was radiation sickness," Mary said. "I've seen pictures of that, and - "

"Whoa," Johnny said, raising his hands. "I want to make a suggestion. I think we should sit down and talk this out. Okay? It'll pass the time, if nothing else, and an idea of what we should do next may come Out of it." He looked at Audrey, gave her his most winning smile, and was delighted to see her relax a little, if not exactly melt. Maybe not all of the old charm had departed after all. "At the very least, it will be more constructive than making shadows on the movie screen."

His smile faded a little and he turned to look at them:

Audrey, standing on the edge of the rug in her gawky-sexy dress; David, squatting by the TV; Steve and Cynthia, now sitting on the arms of an overstuffed easy chair that looked like it might also have come from the old Circle Ranch; Mary, standing by the screen and looking schoolteacherly with her arms folded under her breasts; Tom Billingsley, now inspecting the open upper cabinet of the bar, with his hands tightly clasped behind his back; Ralph in the wing-chair at the edge of the light, with his left eye now puffed almost completely shut. The Collie Entragian Survival Society, all present and accounted for.

What a crew, Johnny thought. Manhattan Transfer in the desert.

"There's another reason we have to talk," he said. He glanced at their shadows bobbing on the curtainless movie screen. For a moment they all looked to him like the shadows of giant birds. He thought of Entragian, telling him buzzards farted, they were the only birds that did. Of Entragian saying Oh shit, we're all beyond why you know that. Johnny thought that might well be the scariest thing anyone had said to him in his whole life Mostly because it rang true.

Johnny nodded slowly, as if in agreement with some interior speaker, then went on.

"I've seen some extraordinary things in my life, but I've never had what I could in any way characterize as a supernatural experience. Until-maybe-today. And what scares me the most about it is that the experience may be ongoing. I don't know. All I can say for sure is that things have happened to me in the last few hours that I can explain."

"What are you talking about?" Audrey sounded close to tears. "Isn't what's happening bad enough without turning it into some kind of a. . . a campfire story?"

"Yes," Johnny said, speaking in a low, compassionate voice that he hardly recognized. "But that doesn't change things."

"I listen and talk better when I'm not starving to death, Mary remarked. "I don't suppose there's anything to eat in this place, is there?"

Tom Billingsley shuffled his feet and looked embarrassed. "Well, no, not a whole lot, ma'am. Mostly we came here in the evenings to drink and talk over the old days."

She sighed. "That's what I thought."

He pointed vaguely across toward the stage-right en trance. "Marty Ives brought in a little bag of somethin a r couple of nights ago. Probably sardines. Marty loves sardines and crackers."

"Yuck," Mary said, but she looked interested almost in spite of herself. Johnny supposed that in another two or three hours even anchovies would look good to her.

"I'll take a peek, maybe he brought in something else," Billingsley said. He didn't sound hopeful.

David got up. "I'll do it, if you want."

Billingsley shrugged. He was looking at Audrey again and seemed to have lost interest in Marty Ives's sardines. "There's a light-switch to the left just as you get offstage. Straight ahead you'll see some shelves. Anything people brought to eat, they most generally put it on those. You might find some Oreos, too."

"You guys might've drunk a tad too much, but at least you kept the minimum nutrition needs in mind," Johnny said. "I like that." The vet gave him a glance, shrugged, and went back to Audrey Wyler's legs. She seemed not to notice his interest in them. Or to care.

David started across the stage, then went back and picked up the .45. He glanced at his father, but Ralph was staring vacantly out into the house again, at red plush seats which faded back into the gloom. The boy put the gun carefully into the pocket of his jeans so that only the handle stuck out, then started offstage. As he passed Billingsley he said, "Is there running water?"

"This is the desert, son. When a building goes vacant, they turn the water off."

"Crud. I've still got soap all over me. It itches."

He left them, crossed the stage, and leaned into the opening over there. A moment later the light came on. Johnny relaxed slightly - only realizing as he did that part of his mind had expected something to jump the boy - and realized Billingsley was looking at him.

"What that kid did back there - the way he got out of that cell - that was impossible," Billingsley said.

"Then we must still be back there, locked up," Johnny said. He thought he sounded all right - pretty much like himself - but what the old veterinarian was saying had already occurred to him. Even a phrase to describe it had occurred to him-unobtrusive miracles. He would have written it down in his notebook, if he hadn't dropped it beside Highway 50. "Is that what you think?"

"No, we're here, and we saw him do what he did," Billingsley said. "Greased himself up with soap and squeezed out through the bars like a watermelon seed.

Looked like it made sense, didn't it? But I tell you, friend not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. He should stuck at the head, but he didn't." He looked them over, one by one, finishing with Ralph was looking at Billingsley now instead of at the seats, but Johnny wasn't sure he understood what the old guy was saying. And maybe that was for the best.

"What are you driving at?" Mary asked.

"I'm not sure," Billingsley replied. "But I think we d do well to kind of gather 'round young Master Carver

He hesitated, then added: "The oldtimers say that any campfire does on a cold night."

2

It picked the dead coyote up and examined it. "Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains," it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone. "So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die."

It carried the animal downstairs, paws and shattered head dangling, body swaying like a bloody fur stole. The creature holding it stood for a moment inside the main doors of the Municipal Building, looking out into the blowy dark, listening to the wind.

"So cah set!" it exclaimed, then turned away and took the animal into the Town Office. It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl - Pie, to her brother - had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.

Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child s covered form.

"Took her down!" it told the dead coyote in its arms "Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy'

Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn't it? The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life's wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.

Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from

(Entragian her it them)

even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched over-blown prideful praying boy, who had had the insolence to take down his little cunt of a sister and try to give her something approximating a decent burial -

A kind of dull warmth on its fingers and palms. It looked down and saw that it had plunged Ellen's hands into the coyote's belly all the way to the wrists.

It had intended to hang the coyote on one of the hooks, simply because that was what it had done with some of the others, but now another idea occurred. It carried the coyote across to the green bundle on the floor, knelt, and pulled the drape open. It looked down with a silent snarling mouth at the dead girl who had grown inside this present body.

That he should have covered her!

It pulled Ellen's hands, now dressed in lukewarm blood-gloves, out of the coyote and laid the animal down on top of Kirsten. It opened the coyote's jaws and placed them around the child's neck. There was something both grisly and fantastic about this tableau de Ia mort; it was like a woodcut illustration from a black fairy-tale.

"Tak," it whispered, and grinned. Ellen Carver's lower lip split open when it did. Blood ran down her chin in an unnoticed rill. The rotten, presumptuous little boy would probably never view this revision of his revision, but how nice it was to imagine his reaction to it if he did! If he saw how little his efforts had come to, how easily respect could be snatched back, how naturally zero reasserted itself in the artificially concocted integers of men.

It pulled the drape up to the coyote's neck. Now the child and the beast almost seemed to be lovers. How it wished the boy were here! The father, too, but especially the boy. Because it was the boy who so badly needed instruction.

It was the boy who was the dangerous one.

There was scuttering from behind it, a sound too low to be heard . . . but it heard it anyway. It pivoted on Ellen's knees and saw the recluse spiders returning. They came through the Town Office door, turned left, then streamed up the wall, over posters announcing forthcoming town business and soliciting volunteers for this fall's Pioneer Days extravaganza. Above the one announcing an informational meeting at which Desperation Mining Corpora-tion officials would discuss the resumption of copper mining at the so-called China Pit, the spiders reformed their circle.

The tall woman in the coverall and the Sam Browne belt got up and approached them. The circle on the wall trembled, as if expressing fear or ecstasy or perhaps both. The woman put bloody hands together, then opened them to the wall, palms out. "Ah lah?"

The circle dissolved. The spiders scurried into a new shape, moving with the precision of a drill-team putting on a halftime show. I, they made, then broke up, scurried, and made an H. An E followed, an A, another T, another E.

It waved them off while they were still scrambling around up there, deciding how to fall in and make an R.

"En tow," it said. "Ras."

The spiders gave up on their R and resumed their faintly trembling circle.

"Ten ah?" it asked after a moment, and the spiders formed a new figure. It was a circle, the shape of the mi. The woman with Ellen Carver's fingerprints looked at it for several moments, tapping Ellen's fingers against Ellen's collarbones, then waved Ellen's hand at the wall. The figure broke up. The spiders began to stream down to the floor.

It walked back out into the hall, not looking at the spiders streaming about its feet. The spiders would be available if it needed them, and that was all that mattered.

It stood at the double doors, once more looking out into the night. It couldn't see the old movie house, but that was all right; it knew where The American West was, about an eighth of a mile north of here, just past the town's only intersection. And, thanks to the fiddlebacks, she now knew where they were, as well.

Where he was. The shitting little prayboy.

3

Johnny Marinville told his story again - all of it, this time. For the first time in a good many years he tried to keep it short - there were critics all over America who would have applauded, partly in disbelief. He told them about stopping to take a leak, and how Entragian had planted the pot in his saddlebag while he was doing it. He told them about the coyotes - the one Entragian had seemed to talk to and the others, posted along the road at intervals like a weird honor guard - and about how the big cop had beaten him up. He recounted the murder of Billy Rancourt, and then, with no appreciable change in his voice, about how the buzzard had attacked him, seem-ingly at Collie Entragian's command.

There was an expression of frank disbelief on Audrey Wyler's face at this, but Johnny saw Steve and the skinny little girl he'd picked up somewhere along the way exchange a look of sick understanding. Johnny didn't glance around to see how the others were taking it, but instead looked down at his hands on his knees, concentrating as he did when he was trying to work through a tough patch of composition.

"He wanted me to suck his cock. I think that was supposed to start me gibbering and begging for mercy, but I didn't find the idea as shocking as Entragian maybe expected. Cocksucking's a pretty standard sexual demand in situations where authority's exceeded its normal bounds and restrictions, but it's not what it looks like. On the surface, rape is about dominance and aggression. Underneath, though, it's about fear-driven anger."

"Thank you, Dr. Ruth," Audrey said. "Next ye vill be discussink ze imberdence."

Johnny looked at her without rancor. "I did a novel on the subject of homosexual rape. Tiburon. Not a big critical success, but I talked to a lot of people and got the basics down pretty well, I think. The point is, he made me mad instead of scaring me. By then I'd decided I didn't have a lot to lose, anyway. I told him that I'd take his cock, all right, but once it was in my mouth I'd bite it off. Then . ., then . . .

He thought harder than he had in at least ten years, nodding to himself as he did.

"Then I threw one of his own nonsense-words back at him. At least it seemed like nonsense to me, or something in a made-up language. It had a guttural quality..

"Was it tak?" Mary asked.

Johnny nodded. "And it didn't seem to be nonsense to the coyotes, or to Entragian, either. When I said it he kind of recoiled. . . and that's when he called the buzzard bombing-strike down on me."

"I don't believe that happened," Audrey said. "I guess you're a famous writer or something, and you've got the look of a guy who isn't used to having doubt cast, so to speak, but I just don't believe it."

"It's what happened, though," he said. "You didn't see anything like that? Strange, aggressive animal behavior?"

"I was hiding in the town laundrymat," she said. "I mean, hello? Are we talking the same language here?"

"But-"

"Listen, you want to talk about strange and aggressive animal behavior?" Audrey asked. She leaned forward, eyes bright and fixed on Marinville's. "That's Collie you're talking about. Collie as he is now. He killed everyone he saw, everyone who crossed his path. Isn't that enough for you? Do we have to have trained buzzards, as well?"

"What about spiders?" Steve asked. He and the skinny girl were in the chair instead of sitting on the arms now, and Steve had his arm around her shoulders.

"What about them?"

"Did you see any spiders kind of. . . well . . . flocking together?"

"Like birds of a feather?" She was favoring him with a gaze that said CAUTION, LUNATIC AT WORK.

"Well, no. Wrong word. Travelling together. In packs. Like wolves. Or coyotes."

She shook her head.

"What about snakes?"

"Haven't seen any of them, either. Or coyotes in town. Not even a dog riding a bike and wearing a party hat. This is all news to me."

David came back onto the stage with a brown bag in his hands, the kind that convenience store clerks put small purchases in Twinkies and Slim Jims, cartons of milk, single cans of beer. He also had a box of Ritz crackers under his arm. "Found some stuff," he said.

"Uh-huh," Steve said, eyeing the box and the little bag. "That should certainly take care of hunger in America. What does it come to, Davey? One sardine and two crackers apiece, do you think?"

"Actually, there's quite a lot," David said. "More than you'd think. Um . . . He paused, looking at them thoughtfully, and a little anxiously. "Would anybody mind if I said a prayer before I hand this stuff around?"

"Like grace?" Cynthia asked.

"Grace, yeah."

"It works for me," Johnny said. "I think we can use all the grace we can lay our hands on."

"Amen," Steve said.

David put the bag and the box of crackers down between his sneakers. Then he closed his eyes and put his hands together again before his face, finger to finger. Johnny was struck by the kid's lack of pretension. There was a simplicity about the gesture that had been honed by use into beauty.

"God, please bless this food we are about to eat," David began.

"Yeah, what there is of it," Cynthia said, and immediately looked sorry that she had spoken. David didn't seem to mind, though; might not have even heard her.

"Bless our fellowship, take care of us, and deliver us from evil. Please take care of my mom, too, if it's your will." He paused, then said in a lower voice: "It's probably not, but please, if it's your will. Jesus' sake, amen." He opened his eyes again.

Johnny was moved. The kid's little prayer had touched him in the very place Entragian had tried and failed to reach.

Sure it did. Because he believes it. In his own humble way, this kid makes Pope John Paul in his fancy clothes and Las Vegas hat look like an Easter-and-Christmas Christian.

David bent over and picked up the stuff he'd found, seeming as cheerful as a soup-kitchen tycoon presiding over Thanksgiving dinner as he rummaged in the bag.

"Here, Mary." He took out a can of Blue Fjord Fancy Sardines, and handed it to her. "Key's on the bottom."

"Thank you, David."

He grinned. "Thank Mr. Billingsley's friend. It's his food, not mine." He handed her the crackers. "Pass em"

"Take what you need and leave the rest," Johnny said expansively. "That's what us Friends of the Circle say. . . right, Tom?"

The veterinarian gave him a watery gaze and didn't reply.

David gave a can of sardines to Steve and another to Cynthia.

"Oh, no, honey, that's okay," Cynthia said, trying to give hers back. "Me'n Steve can share."

"No need to," David said, "there's plenty. Honest."

He gave a can to Audrey, a can to Tom, and a can to Johnny. Johnny turned his over twice in his hand, as if trying to make sure it was real, before pulling off the wrapper, taking the key off the back, and inserting it in the tab of metal at the end of the can. He opened it. As soon as he smelled the fish, he was savagely hungry. If anyone had told him he would ever have such a reaction to a lousy can of sardines, he would have laughed.

Something tapped him on the shoulder. It was Mary, holding out the box of crackers. She looked almost ecstatic. Fish-oil ran down from the corner of her mouth to her chin in a shiny little runnel. "Go on," she said. "They're wonderful on crackers. Really!"

"Yep," Cynthia said cheerfully, "everything tastes better when it shits on a Ritz, that's what I always say."

Johnny accepted the box, looked in, and saw there was only a single cylinder of waxed paper left, half-full. He took three of the round dark orange crackers. His growling stomach protested this forbearance, and he found himself unable to keep from taking three more before passing the box to Billingsley. Their eyes met for a moment, and he heard the old man saying not even Houdini could have done it that way. Because of the head. And of course there was the phone - three transmission-bars showing when it had been in the kid's hands, none at all when he had held it in his own.

"This settles it once and for all," Cynthia said, her mouth full. She sounded the way Mary looked. "Food is way better than sex."

Johnny looked at David. He was sitting on one arm of his father's chair, eating. Ralph's can of sardines sat in his lap, unopened, as the man continued to look out over the rows of empty seats. David took a couple of sardines from his own can, laid them carefully on a cracker, and gave them to his dad, who began to chew mechanically, doing it as if his only goal was to clear his mouth again. Seeing the boy's expression of attentive love made Johnny uncomfortable, as if he were violating David's privacy. He looked away and saw the box of crackers on the floor. Everyone was busy eating, and no one paid Johnny any particular attention when he picked up the box and looked into it.

It had gone all the way around the group, everyone had at least half a dozen crackers (Billingsley might have taken even more; the old goat was really cramming them in), but that cylinder of waxed paper was still in there, and Johnny could have sworn that it was still half-full; that the number of crackers in it had not changed at all.

4

Ralph recounted the crash of the Carver family as clearly as he could, eating sardines between bursts of talk. He was trying to clear his head, trying to come back - for David's sake more than his own - but it was hard. He kept seeing Kirstie lying motionless at the foot of the stairs, kept seeing Entragian pulling Ellie across the holding area by the arm. Don't worry, David, I'll be back, she had said, but to Ralph, who believed he had heard every turn and lift of Ellie's voice in their fourteen years of marriage, she had sounded already gone. Still, he owed it to David to try and be here. To come back himself, from wherever it was his shocked, over-stressed-and guilty yes, there was that, too-mind wanted to take him.

But it was hard.

When he had finished, Audrey said: "Okay, no revolt from the animal kingdom, at least. But I m very sorry about your wife and your little girl, Mr. Carver. You too, David."

"Thanks," Ralph said, and when David added, "My mom could still be okay," he ruffled the boy's hair and told him yes, that was right.

Mary went next, telling about the Baggie under the spare tire, the way Entragian had mixed "I'm going to kill you" into the Miranda warning, and the way he had shot her husband on the steps, completely without warning or provocation.

"Still no wildlife," Audrey said. This now seemed to be her central concern. She tilted her sardine - can up to her mouth and drank the last of the fish oil without so much as a flicker of embarrassment.

"You either didn't hear the part about the coyote he brought upstairs to guard us or you don't want to hear it Mary said.

Audrey dismissed this with a wave of her hand. She was sitting down now, providing Billingsley with at least another four inches of leg to look at. Ralph was looking, too, but he felt absolutely nothing about what he was seeing. He had an idea there was more juice in some old car batteries than there was in his emotional wiring right now.

"You can domesticate them, you know," she said "Feed them Gainesburgers and train them like dogs, in fact."

"Did you ever see Entragian walking around town with a coyote on a leash?" Marinville asked politely.

She gave him a look and set her jaw. "No. I knew him to speak to, like anyone else in town, but that was all. I spend most of my time in the pit or the lab or out riding I'm not much for town life."

"What about you, Steve?" Marinville asked. "What's your tale?"

Ralph saw the rangy fellow with the Texas accent exchange a glance with his girlfriend - if that was what she was - and then look back at the writer. "Well, first off, if you tell your agent I picked up a hitchhiker, I guess I'll lose my bonus."

"I think you can consider him the least of your worries at this point. Go on. Tell it."

They both told it, alternating segments, both clearly aware that the things they had seen and experienced upped the ante of belief considerably. They both expressed frustration at their inability to articulate how awful the stone fragment in the lab! storage area had been, how powerfully it had affected them, and neither seemed to want to come out and say what had happened when the wolf (they agreed that that was what it had been, not a coyote) brought the fragment out of the lab and laid it before them. Ralph had an idea it was something sexual, although what could be so bad about that he didn't know.

"Still a doubting Thomas?" Marinville asked Audrey when Steve and Cynthia had finished. He spoke mildly, as if he did not want her to feel threatened. Of course he doesn't want her to feel threatened, Ralph thought. There's only seven of us, he wants us all on the same team. And he's really not too bad at it.

"I don't know what I am." She sounded dazed. "I don't want to believe any of this shit-just considering it freaks me severely - but I can't imagine why you'd lie." She paused, then said thoughtfully: "Unless seeing those people hung up in Hernando's Hideaway. . . I don't know, scared you so badly that. .

"That we started seeing things?" Steve asked.

She nodded. "The snakes you saw in the house-that at least makes sense of a sort. They feel this kind of weather coming as much as three days in advance sometimes, and go for any sheltered place. As for the rest. . . I don't know. I'm a scientist, and I can't see how - "

"Come on, lady, you're like a kid pretending her mouth is stitched shut so she won't have to eat the broccoli," cynthia said. "Everything we saw dovetails with what Mr. Marinville there saw before us, and Mary saw before him and the Carvers saw before them. Right down to the knocked-over piece of picket fence where Entragian greased the barber, or whoever he was. So quit the I'm-a- scientist crap for awhile. We're all on the same page; you're the one that's on a different one.

"But I didn't see any of these things!" Audrey almost wailed.

"What did you see?" Ralph asked. "Tell us."

Audrey crossed her legs, tugged at the hem of her dress "I was camping. I had four days off, so I packed up Sally and headed north, into the Copper Range. It's my favorite place in Nevada." Ralph thought she looked defensive as if she had taken a ribbing for this sort of behavior in the past.

Billingsley looked as if he had just wakened from a dream . . . one of having Audrey's long legs wrapped around his scrawny old butt, perhaps. "Sally," he said "How is Sally?"

Audrey gave him an uncomprehending look for a moment, then grinned like a girl. "She's fine."

"Strain all better?"

"Yes, thanks. It was good liniment."

"Glad to hear it."

"What're you talking about?" Marinville asked.

"I doctored her horse a year or so back," Billingsley said. "That's all."

Ralph wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on his horse, if he had one; he wasn't sure he would let Billingsley work on a stray cat.. But he supposed the vet might have been different a year ago. When you made drinking a career, twelve months could make a lot of changes. Few of them for the better.

"Getting Rattlesnake back on its feet has been pretty stressful," she said. "Lately it's been the switchover from rainbirds to emitters. A few eagles died - "

"A few?" Billingsley said. "Come now. I'm no tree hugger, but you can do better than that."

"All right, about forty, in all. No big deal in terms of the species; there's no shortage of eagles in Nevada. As you know, Doe. The greens know it, too, but they treat each dead eagle as if it were a boiled baby, just the same What it's really about - and all it's about - is trying to stop us from mining the copper. God, they make me so tired sometimes. They come out here in their perky little foreign cars, fifty pounds of American copper in each one, and tell us we're earth-raping monsters. They - "

"Ma'am?" Steve said softly. "Pardon, but ain't a one of us folks from Greenpeace."

"Of course not. What I'm saying is that we all felt bad about the eagles, the hawks and the ravens too, for that matter, in spite of what the treehuggers say." She looked around at them, as if to evaluate their impression of her honesty, then went on. "We leach copper out of the ground with sulfuric acid. The easiest way to apply it is with rainbirds - they look like big lawn-sprinklers. But rainbirds can leave pools. The birds see them, come down to bathe and drink, then die. It's not a nice death, either."

"No," Billingsley agreed, blinking at her with his watery eyes. "When it was gold they were taking out of China Pit and Desatoya Pit - back in the fifties - it was cyanide in the pools. Just as nasty. No greenie-treehuggers back then, though. Must have been nice for the company, eh, Miss Wyler?" He got up, went to the bar, poured himself a finger of whiskey, and swallowed it like medicine.

"Could I have one about the same?" Ralph asked.

"Yessir, I b'Iieve you could," Billingstey said. He handed Ralph his drink, then set out more glasses. He offered warm soft drinks, but the others opted for spring- water, which he poured out of a plastic jug.

"We pulled the rainbirds and replaced them with distribution heads and emitters," Audrey said. "It's a drip-system, more expensive than rainbirds-a lot-but the birds don't get into the chemicals."

"No," Billingsley agreed. He poured himself another tot. This he drank more slowly, looking at Audrey's legs again over the rim of his glass.

5

A problem?

Maybe not yet . . . but there could be, if steps weren't taken.

The thing that looked like Ellen Carver sat behind the desk in the now-empty holding area, head up, eyes gleaming lustrously. Outside, the wind rose and fell, rose and fell. From closer by came the pad-click of paws ascending the stairs. They stopped outside the door. There came a coughing growl. Then the door swung open, pushed by the snout of a cougar. She was big for a female-perhaps six feet from snout to haunches, with a thick, switching tail that added another three feet to her overall length.

As the cougar came through the door and into the holding area, slinking low to the board floor, her ears laid back against her wedgeshaped skull, the thing cored into her head a little further, wanting to experience a bit of what the cougar was feeling as well as to draw her. The animal was frightened, sorting through the smells of the place and finding no comfort in any of them. It was a human den-place; but that was only part of her problem.

The cougar smelled a lot of trouble here. Gunpowder, for one thing; to the cougar, the smell of the fired guns was still sharp and acrid. Then there was the smell of fear, like a mixture of sweat and burned grass. There was the smell of blood, too - coyote blood and human blood, mixed together. And there was the thing in the chair, looking down at her as she slunk toward it, not wanting to go but not able to stop. It looked like a human being but didn't smell like one. It didn't smell like anything the cougar had ever scented before. She crouched by its feet and voiced a low whining, mewing sound.

The thing in the coverall got out of the chair, dropped to Ellen Carver's knees, lifted the cougar's snout, and looked into the cougar's eyes. It began to speak rapidly in that other language, the tongue of the unformed, telling the cougar where she must go, how she must wait, and what she must do when the time came. They were armed and would likely kill the animal, but she would do her job first.

As it spoke, Ellen's nose began to trickle blood. It felt the blood, wiped it away. Blisters had begun to rise on Ellen's cheeks and neck. Fucking yeast infection! Noth-ing more than that, at least to start with! Why was it some women simply could not take care of themselves?

"All right," it told the cougar. "Go on, now. Wait until it's time. I'll listen with you."

The cougar made its whining, mewing sound again, licked with its rough tongue at the hand of the thing wearing Ellen Carver's body, then turned and padded out of the room.

It resumed the chair and leaned back in it. It closed Ellen's eyes and listened to the ceaseless rattle of sand against the windows, and let part of itself go with the animal.